This very short book shows that Obama administration subverted and politicized the DOJ and the intelligence community from its first days. Obama filled the top ranks of the DOJ with what usually restrained Andrew McCarthy calls al Qaeda Defense Bar, and investigated the CIA, FBI, and DOJ officials who fought the war on terror. The book was released in 2010 based on less than a year of the Obama administration. No doubt, it became worse toward the end. This is what Donald Trump has been facing. (The quotes are from the Kindle edition. Emphasis is added.)
[Eric] Holder reopened an investigation of six-year-old allegations against CIA interrogators – an investigation that had been closed because professional career prosecutors (i.e., not Bush political appointees) had determined that no crimes had been committed. … The CIA officers must endure additional expense and anxiety, while the intelligence community recedes into the ethos of risk aversion that allowed 9/11 to happen.
This is how the Obama administration shaped the CIA to be a political lapdog of the Democratic party, more willing to attack political opponents at home than to handle adversaries abroad.
Egged on by his leftist base, Obama threatened Bush officials waging the war on terror, with retaliation for what they considered “transgressions against international humanitarian law”.
When that Obama administration became a reality, Holder was tapped to be its attorney general. He threaded his new Justice Department – particularly its upper tier – with veterans of the al Qaeda Bar.
The al Qaeda Bar refers to the far left lawyers that volunteered to represent accused terrorists.
Holder went banana republic, turning his vast prosecutorial powers against the Obama Left’s Most Wanted list. Investigations were pursued against Bush administration lawyers and CIA interrogators.
Even worse,
Holder in fact told the German press in April that he was open to cooperation with European investigations of Bush “war crimes.”
Back to the al Qaeda Bar:
Covington & Burling, the Washington law firm at which the former deputy attorney general [Eric Holder] was a senior partner, threw in its lot with the al Qaeda Defense Bar …
BTW, this is the same firm that initially represented General Flynn, and advised him to plead guilty!
… Attorney General Holder, whose firm made the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay its most lavishly resourced no-fee project (3, 022 hours in 2007 alone). Covington & Burling’s Web site proudly boasts about the firm’s success in urging federal judges to grant its “clients” – 18 enemy combatants – new “rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.”
On whose side was the Obama’s DOJ in the war on terror?
The lead counsel for Salim Hamdan – Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and bodyguard – was Neal Katyal, a former Georgetown law professor who is now [2009] the Justice Department’s deputy solicitor general. Holder’s Deputy Attorney General David Ogden – whose clients included child-pornography producers and pro-abortion extremists – worked at a firm that represented three enemy combatants … The problems go well beyond Holder, Ogden and their top staffers (drafted from these same firms). Similar conflicts plague, among others, Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli (DOJ’s No. 3 official) and the chiefs of both the Criminal and Civil Divisions, Lenny Breuer [Lanny Breuer] and Tony West (the latter volunteered his services to represent John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” …)
Some Some Obama nominees were so radical that Senate refused to confirm them. But
Holder has a freer hand with posts that do not require Senate consent. That explains his hiring of Jennifer Daskal, a lawyer with no prosecutorial experience, to work in Justice’s National Security Division. Her qualification? Daskal is a left-wing activist who advocated on behalf of al Qaeda prisoners …
When Brennan allegedly spied on Sen. Feinstein, he might have been the good guy.
KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED realized the end was near. The legions of left-wing lawyers who’d volunteered their services to the al Qaeda Defense Bar had pulled out all the stops in their eight-year jihad against Bush-style counterterrorism. Their bête noire had been the military commission system, the time-honored procedure for trying war crimes.
When KSM had been grabbed in Pakistan back in 2003, he smugly told his captors that he’d talk to them in New York . . . with his lawyer. To his chagrin, though, the maestro of 9/11 soon learned that the lawfare party of the 90s was over. He found himself talking to the CIA.
But when Obama was elected, he brought the lawfare back,
Holder gave KSM his wish: a New York City stage where, after rifling through government intelligence files for the next two years, he gets to put the United States on trial for the stratagems that protected Americans from reprises of 9/11.
The Obama officials opened intelligence files to KSM lawyers-sympathizers. Later, Obama holdovers fought document requests from Sydney Powell, the lawyer for General Flynn lawyer.